Engineering Manager - Frontier AI Infra (Hands-On Leader)

United States Digital Space LLC; Washington (District of Columbia); Hybrid; USD 214,000 - 267,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental and vision coverage

Learning and development stipend

Generous PTO

Job summary

Scale AI is hiring an Engineering Manager for the Frontier AI Infrastructure team in Public Sector. The role blends leadership with hands-on coding, guiding a small team while actively contributing to code and architecture.

You’ll drive the inference layer, collaborate with product and cloud vendors, and deliver on government contracts with secure, scalable backend systems. You will manage hiring, define priorities, and ensure delivery, while maintaining hands-on involvement in code reviews and

Qualifications

• 1–2+ years direct people management experience (hiring, performance, career development)
• Active Secret clearance required; ability to upgrade to TS/SCI with CI Poly
• Hands-on in code while leading a team; not a purely manager role

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and grow a team of engineers; own hiring and onboarding
• Set technical direction and quarterly priorities for the inference layer
• Run sprint planning, on‑call rotation, incident reviews, and postmortems
• Translate customer and mission requirements into roadmaps with cross‑functional partners
• Represent the team in customer engagements and vendor escalations
• Design and implement secure, scalable backend systems for Public Sector customers
• Own services and systems, define long‑term health goals, and improve related components
• Stay hands-on by reviewing PRs and debugging production issues

Skills

People management

Hands-on coding

Full stack development

Cloud-native technologies

Security/compliance

Problem solving

Collaborative communication

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

Scale AI is hiring an Engineering Manager for the Frontier AI Infrastructure team in Public Sector. The role blends leadership with hands-on coding, guiding a small team while actively contributing to code and architecture.

You’ll drive the inference layer, collaborate with product and cloud vendors, and deliver on government contracts with secure, scalable backend systems. You will manage hiring, define priorities, and ensure delivery, while maintaining hands-on involvement in code reviews and